Overland

Normally a journey to Myanmar starts at an airport. This time I chose to begin at a bus station in Kanchanaburi, Thailand. Not far from there is a border checkpoint that has been open to foreigners for about two and a half years. The twisty gravel road from the checkpoint ends at a sleepy southern Myanmar town called Dawei. When you figure in the cost of time and onward travel to Yangon, the overland crossing isn’t faster or cheaper than going by air. But it’s varied and pretty and unpredictable—in other words, all the reasons we travel.

Vans to the border leave Kanchanaburi every 90 minutes starting at 9am. I picked the first one because I wanted to be in Dawei before dark. We reached the checkpoint at 10:30, including time for stopping on a lovely Thai side road to buy a few bamboo tubes of sticky rice from the van driver’s auntie.

Leaving Thailand went smoothly, just like at any airport. From the checkpoint I walked about 100 yards to a little courtyard where I could book transport to Dawei or buy breakfast. They took my passport and 800 baht. In a few minutes they gave me back my passport, a ticket, and a photocopy of my visa for Myanmar Immigration. A shuttle drove me and a few other travelers the five or so miles through what I guess is a no-man’s-land.

The shuttle turned around in Htee Kee, a Karen town with a Burmese name. People there speak Karen, Thai, Mon, Burmese, and a little English. The immigration office felt a little rougher than the Thai counterpart I had just left but it got the job done. The staff seemed grateful for the photocopy.

Next up in the transportation chain: the dispatcher. He arranges full vehicles for passengers from both directions. Anybody who’s ever traveled in Asia knows that times like these are good times to go get a coffee and open a book. In this case the wait turned out not to be too long, maybe 30 minutes. Probably some days it’s two minutes and other days two hours, all depending on who else is going.

The dispatcher came and went several times before pointing to a Toyota hatchback. The driver and the only other traveler both hailed from Dawei. They had plenty to talk about so they took the front seats and I got to stretch out in back, with a seat belt even. Communication was easy because they spoke Thai.

For the next three hours we saw no more than 20-30 other vehicles. A few motorcycles carried people who looked like they would be stopping often to work in the sparse forest. There were no trucks other than a convoy of five Thai double-tractor-trailers that rumbled our way just as we formally entered Myanmar. The trucks looked too clean and formal to have traveled very far. I wondered if they had crossed from Thailand earlier in the day to pick up an unofficial shipment of something that Customs would wave through uninspected.

The terrain started out hilly, gradually giving way to jungly, and then cultivated. Finally we encountered a bit of extraction, though it was hard to tell exactly which minerals were being carved out of the hillsides and sluiced out of the river. We made a steady 30km/hour, slowing for clouds of dust and one-lane-only bridges. No pavement, no cement electric poles, almost no settlements. The scattered houses were made only of bamboo and thatch. Whenever we passed a building of any size, it flew the flag of the Karen National Union.

Shortly before 3pm we stopped at a roadside office with no markings. The driver disappeared with my passport for much longer than the “official” immigration people in Htee Kee had needed to look at it. After that point it seemed we had entered our third country of the day. Busier and busier villages, more and more rubber or plantations of this and that, and finally tea shops and electronics displays.

Downtown Dawei is full of old lattice and lace houses that have been kept up nicely. The people charmed me too. The next morning I asked the guest house owner about where to find good mohinga. She described the directions and then added, “Bring me some back, will you?” A friendly welcome to Myanmar.

Open Wind

In the massage shop at Bangkok’s southern bus station, making use of a gift hour resulting from my first-choice bus being sold out, I told the masseuse about a crick in the neck caused perhaps by sleeping the wrong way. She began with the feet, as they do, and after about five minutes said something about “bpeurt lom,” meaning to “open the wind.” At first I figured she was referring to an electric fan as the room was a little bit warm. I said fine, for me it’s OK either way.

But then she didn’t stand up or move toward any switches, and it occurred to me that she might not be talking about fans at all. The word for wind in Thai can also refer to the life force… not exactly the same as “chi,” but in that category. Maybe she was referring to the beginning stage of any massage, giving me a kind of description of what she was doing? Something along the lines of “With these humble hands of mine I will now unblock your essential energy.” Which she then proceeded to do.

She got a big tip. The massage had so many nice results. My neck really did feel better the next day. Almost as nice was the feeling I got after figuring out the second possible translation. It’s satisfying to have lived in a region long enough to realize there’s more than one option. In Thailand I have a chance of understanding unexpected or deadpan remarks. In Myanmar my language skills are still a long way from that place.

A Thing to Think About

An elephant is a thing to think about. Its many parts are somehow larger than life: the bristly hairs as long as pine needles, the squishy feet as baggy as bell-bottom pants. Even on its knees, an elephant impresses. In its genuflection there is no submission. An elephant kneeling may be the wisest and bravest of all, we concluded while contemplating elephants up close this week.

Six of us traveled to the forested mountains west of Taunggoo, where we arranged to ride and watch working pachyderms. Their job that day was pulling felled tree trunks from where they had been cut to where they could be turned into planks. Our job, not that we had given it any thought, was to stay out of their way.

Three “carrying elephants” knelt as we approached them. That way, pairs of wooden seats that had been laid across their broad tops became low enough for us to climb into. The seats faced sideways. After two of us sat back to back on each elephant, the mahouts leapt up on the elephants’ necks and signaled that it was OK for the animals to stand up.

Three more “pulling elephants,” each with a mahout but no other passengers, then led us along a quiet ridge. We could hear the wooden jangle of the elephant bells over the sound of a light wind. Our parade consisted of six elephants, six mahouts, and six tourists. We had left behind the city, the highway, even the village. All was right with the world.

Then we plunged into the jungle down a steep hillside trail. We realized we would simply have to hold on tight. There were no seatbelts. After about 20 minutes of jouncing we reached a clearing. A few loggers stood waiting for us, holding the ends of three chains they had wrapped around three tree trunks. The logs, lying on the ground, were about half as long as telephone poles. I guessed each one weighed about 500 pounds.

It emerged that the elephants knew their business. Generally, they were willing to take orders from their mahouts, but sometimes they judged that the easiest way would be blazing their own trail instead of following the one we had ridden in on. From our three carrying elephants we watched with both awe and dread when the three others headed off cross-country. The huge loads behind them scoured the tilted landscape.

The logger boss mostly paid attention to the youngest-looking mahout. The kid tried not to look nervous but he gave himself away by the rough way he used his elephant hook. Or perhaps he and his elephant were still getting acquainted. All we knew for sure was that the mahouts on the other two pulling elephants managed to communicate with their voices rather than by prodding.

Then the elephant under the kid mahout misread the terrain. Its log began to roll downhill. The kid shouted and thrashed wildly as the elephant dropped to its knees, grunting and crawling forward. Our elephants steered clear as we stared with train-wreck fascination. The log lurched. Five seconds felt like fifty. Finally, the pulling elephant snorted and straightened, the cargo under control.

The boss told us later that two or three times in 20 years, he had seen a log drag an elephant. Once, a leg broke.

Half an hour later, back on the ridge, we all breathed normally again. “It never occurred to me when we set out that we would be eight feet away from a working elephant,” said one of my friends, who is roughly the same age as I am. His teenaged son’s comment was “Dope AF,” which I gather is high praise and maybe best left abbreviated.

Star Power

Myanmar struggles with the idea of women as decision makers, particularly when the woman holds a public role. Yet the recent election saw a jump in the number of female office holders. Their representation in legislatures nearly tripled, from 5% to over 13%. That number still lags behind the country’s neighbors, and is far lower than the target of 30% that the UN claims is needed for parliaments to represent women's concerns.

Both health and education policy stand to gain in Myanmar because of the improved gender balance among legislators. Also, in this country there is one woman whose presence counts as several.

Aung San Suu Kyi’s victory helps build an alternate reality for Burmese women. She combines Eastern and Western, establishment and outsider, politician and activist, prisoner and freebird.

She even claims a certain military legacy, as her father, a general, is considered the founder of the modern armed forces in Myanmar. He remains an idol throughout the country, despite having been assassinated 68 years ago, when his daughter was just a toddler. It’s fair to say that nobody will ever again hold a pedigree like hers.

Plus, what villages, states, and institutions of all kinds in Myanmar always wait for is a hero. Ordinary people don’t think of success as coming through teamwork, but rather from following an inspiring leader.

Therefore the Lady’s years as leader of a majority party will be critical for making change here. Concerning the peace process in particular, she may have a unique set of attributes. Her father gets credit for a 1947 agreement, never implemented, that would have given ethnic groups a degree of autonomy that they have never truly possessed under a central government here.  

It’s unlikely the new political chapter now beginning here will lead to anything resembling what the West considers “women’s rights.” In past statements, “Mother Suu” has made clear she doesn’t consider herself a feminist. Even if she had such an agenda, the country’s general culture, and the military’s specific culture, might not be receptive. Yet simply by continuing to be at the front of the parade, she can’t help but ensure that a long line of women marches behind her.

Election Wrapup

Seven days ago people here slipped out early to polling stations and then came straight home. Many families even stocked up on food in case things went badly.

Despite the event being worthy of celebration, the powers-that-be managed to make it feel scary. The small group of leaders in Myanmar were allowing a more inclusive system to emerge, yet guaranteeing their right to clamp down if that system became unstable. 

By evening on election day, fear of violence slowly dissolved, replaced by excitement and confidence. Here in Yangon, streets that had been empty in the morning began to fill up. It became clear that citizens hadn’t paid a price to participate. Two days later, on a bus traveling to Naypyidaw, I noticed people proudly displaying their purple left pinkies: proof that they had voted.

The country savored that election delight throughout the week as reports grew of an absolute majority for the party whose slogan is “Time for Change.” The National League for Democracy (NLD), led by Aung San Suu Kyi, clearly has repeated its rout of 1990. Back then, the government refused to honor the outcome and instead arrested The Lady, as Suu Kyi is commonly known. This time, it appears the vote will be allowed to stand.

Which of course presents a whole new set of problems. The stunning results don’t instantly erase the countless challenges here. As one member of the ruling party was quoted as saying, “Our USDP lost completely. The NLD has won. Daw Aung San Suu Kyi has to take responsibility now.” Among the headaches she inherits are tense relationships with ethnic armed groups, an out-of-balance economy, environmental damage, and pressures from neighboring countries.

The former junta has protected itself well by creating a complex political system that allows it to claim quasi-civilian status.

The Constitution provides its members a quarter of Parliament’s seats without having to run for them, plus control of key ministries and many other perks. The military can be embarrassed but never really lose. Some people suggest that despite the election outcome, real authority in the country remains with a few generals and a few wealthy families.

Aung San Suu Kyi and her party find themselves with all the responsibility but not enough power to create their “time for change.” Indeed, they’re in the weird position of needing to continue behaving as the minority opposition party, despite superiority in numbers. There can’t be too many places in the world where that’s the case.

The election season’s biggest losers may be Muslims. For the first time, they’re not represented in Parliament at all. Large numbers of them were prevented from voting, and parties that tried to run Muslim candidates often had their candidates rejected by the national election commission. Many say they feel less welcome in Myanmar than ever. Last month Yale Law School’s human rights clinic added its voice to other groups that claim genocide is being committed against the largest Muslim minority group in western Myanmar. Tragically, many people here aren’t shy about their anti-Muslim feelings. If the NLD were to take an inter-faith harmony stance, it might get a backlash.

Election observers throughout the country breathed easier this past week. Their biggest fear going into last Sunday had been some significant group refusing to accept the outcome. Advance voting wasn’t smooth, and on election day many townships were denied the chance to vote on questionable grounds. Yet the NLD, having won enough seats to pass bills and elect the president (a complicated process from which Aung San Suu Kyi is constitutionally excluded), was not likely to quibble with any irregularities reported. Military rulers this time showed no signs of repeating their 1990 annulment of the results.

Despite the many obstacles faced by Myanmar as it reforms the past several decades’ worth of mis-government, it’s still a wonderful time for the country. Lots of people worked very hard to carry out an election that for its peaceful nature alone can be thought of as a victory in itself.

Minbya Misfortune

Big flooding in late July and early August left its mark on many parts of Myanmar. The poorest regions of course suffer most. A British NGO sent me to check on one such region this week. Specifically, they want to know how well markets are functioning and what has happened to prices since the floods in Rakhine State’s Minbya Township.

Minbya was ranked by earlier flood assessments as among the most severely affected townships in the country. In many spots here, the water rose over 10 feet. Although Rakhine State is well-known for long and heavy monsoon seasons, nobody alive today can recall as extensive a flood in this region.

The NGO may decide to respond with a Cash-for-Rebuilding scheme, depending on what we learn about whether or not beneficiaries would have anywhere to spend the cash. So far it appears that the markets are open for business, that prices are up and sales are down.

This kind of assignment humbles me. The interviews we’re conducting with shopkeepers are nearly always cheerful, despite their descriptions of high water levels and stock losses. Yesterday we went by boat to an elbow in the Lemro River that is home to a market known as Pan Mrauk Gyi. Its location high on the river’s edge was a mixed blessing during July and August.

Shopkeepers in Pan Mrauk Gyi told us that flood depth and stock loss were generally lower for them than for sellers in the towns of Mrauk U and Minbya... except for the nearly one-third of shops that were swept away when the land slid at the center of the riverbend.

We interviewed one grandma whose wares were spread on the ground next to the new cliff edge. A makeshift green tarp above her kept the sun off. She said her shop formerly sat about 20 meters behind her, on the part of the riverbank that had crumbled into the deluge.

All of us became a little teary as she described what she had lost. There is no such thing as flood insurance here.

Got It Good

September in the States is really great. Back when I lived there, and was teaching elementary, I always used to tell the principals that I would prefer school began on October 1st and ended in July. That way we could still enjoy the beginning of autumn without being too busy lesson planning and so forth. In a way I sort of achieved that kind of schedule this year. These past few weeks found me in several parts of the American Midwest and Northwest. It was an easy decision to trade Yangon's worst weather for Washington State’s best. I managed several hikes in both the Cascades and Olympics.

I also became enlightened on concepts that pass me by in Myanmar, such as gluten freedom and gender fluidity and gun foolishness.

Not to mention: Paleo diets, the teenage music scene, and shops that sell pot. In some places I visited, kombucha and almond milk were all the rage. Just when my head had wrapped around those beverages, I was exposed to an astounding range of liquid refreshments with names from just about every zone of life: Double Bastard, Old Godfather, Spin Cycle, Justin Blabaer, Dirty Skoog, Dog Zilla, and Quadrophenia. Life in the US moves pretty fast.

It was also a delight to join in on family birthdays, to see a cousin officially join her first church as the senior pastor, and to hang out with delightful nieces and nephews.

Man, have I ever got it good. I’m feeling very very very lucky to be able to live like this.

Manage-for-Oneself-Land

Around here repairs tend to be of the make-do variety. Instead of pouring new pavement, you parquet the broken concrete pieces jigsaw style. Rather than rewire, you figure out which of the many old strands might still have some life left in them. If you can imagine yet another use for the perforated, preformatted steel planking known as Marston Mat, then you can be sure your supply will never run out here.

The ultimate example of this jury-rigging and MacGyvering took place on the way home from a bike race last weekend. Seven of us had told our friends and families to expect our return from Sagaing Region, north of Mandalay, by dinner time Sunday evening. Then, two setbacks.

First was that Ben won the race. Of course everyone was pleased by this result. But it did mean we couldn’t slip away until after the award ceremony.

Second was that the truck radiator burst. I’m talking about torn asunder. A serious schism. No bubble gum, black pepper, or eggwhite fixes for this badboy. We tried pouring in water, only to watch it gush right out the bottom.

No highway patrolman was going to rock up and ask how he could help. And there’s no such thing here as a roadside assistance organization like AAA. This is Myanmar, otherwise known as Manage-for-Oneself-Land. 

We had no duct tape, no matches, none of the things MacGyver would have pulled out of his bag. Only a truck full of bicycles, a knife or two, and some inner tube patch kits...

..."Hey, wait a sec," we said. If we have patch kits, that means we have inner tubes. And if we have inner tubes...

We set to work stripping the bikes of their tubes, slicing each one along its equator, and fashioning rubber bandages. After wrapping the radiator in bike-tube band-aids, we limped off down the road at 30 miles per hour. Home was about 225 miles away.

Topping up the radiator at the rate of about a gallon per half hour, we arrived in time for breakfast.

Low Inventory

Sometimes during the surveying job that just wrapped up, I had a chance to visit village schools. They slowly began to seem similar to me. Now and then I even wondered if even the students weren’t the same people, silently running ahead of me from village to village on unseen trails.

Typically what I found were one-room buildings containing between 15 and 30 kids, spread among five grades. The good news was that often each grade had its own green-skirted teacher, making for a pretty good ratio. The bad news was that student ages didn’t always match their grades, suggesting that kids start and stop often, in keeping with their families’ financial needs or migration patterns. All of the schools had space for lots more students than actually showed up. Rakhine State is known to have the lowest rate of primary school participation in the country.

On one of the visits I stayed long enough to take inventory. The school, which was among the better resourced I saw, contained the following:

12 very long, low student desks
5 plastic chairs (students sit on the floor)
6 blackboards
3 teacher desks and 3 bamboo pointers
2 flags
1 map of Myanmar
1 number poster
1 English alphabet poster that at first I could not figure out – maybe you can see the logic:
               AEFHIKLM
               NTVWXYZ
               OCQS
               BDGJPRU
1 five-gallon water bottle
1 broom and dustpan
1 Buddha image
1 vase under the Buddha containing dried-out flowers
no children’s art
no calendar
no books

The vision statement of Myanmar’s Ministry of Education aspires to “generate a learning society capable of facing the challenges of the Knowledge Age.” Yet education expenditures here, as a percentage of GDP, are among the lowest in the world. Perhaps it’s no surprise that families vote with their feet and don’t send their kids regularly. The primary school completion rate nationwide is just over 50%.

Wonderful Work in Rakhine State

The privilege of village work again came my way. Over the past month I traveled throughout lush, underdeveloped sections of Myanmar as part of a large UN survey about what households eat, earn, and grow. My role this time was closer to the ground than on the earlier surveys, when I was supervising supervisors.

Picture me in the village headman’s house, listening to him read out the members of all 49 households from memory. He stops from time to time to spit betel or to offer some side commentary about each name. A local civil servant writes each name onto a form. Someone over her shoulder checks the spelling, while someone else prepares 49 numbered slips to pull out of a hat for the lottery that will determine which 12 households get interviewed today. Various elders come and go.

I was again impressed by the undivided attention of the respondents to our questions. They surely knew somewhere in the backs of their minds that the cheroot they didn’t quite finish after dinner last night was still waiting in a special pouch that hangs from the bamboo roof beam. Yet they waited until our queries were finished before pulling it down and taking a puff.

At one house I recall a playful argument over the correct name for a fish species, which like so many other things in this country goes by several labels. When we learned that the fish were caught and not bought, an additional section of the questionnaire was then required. Nobody complained. Even after 90 minutes of such back and forth, seated on a bamboo floor, interviewers and interviewees alike seemed willing to keep talking forever.

Almost nobody wore a watch—somehow they just knew when it was time to head out to the paddy fields, or to traipse home from school, or to shoulder a metal jug and make a trip to the pond for the evening’s drinking water.

As before, it was a privilege to watch the rhythms and hear the stories of village life. I learned to recognize the vocabulary used when talking about how high the water gets in July and August. When I couldn’t understand, I could at least admire the pride of a 70-something woman who lives alone on income sent by four of her sons. Later I learned that she had outlived her fifth son. Her tight, unwavering way of staring at our team may just be the way she has always looked at people—or it may be how she copes.

Then there was the 60-something man whose situation looked to me meager, but not rough enough to explain certain coping strategies he said he had used during the previous seven days: cutting the number of daily meals, sometimes eating rice only, and so on. It emerged that he’d had to reduce his sole income source—firewood gathering—because a snakebite had swelled his hand large enough to prevent him working. On our survey form there’s no spot to mark “snakebite.”

Another family had spent a hefty sum on something the interviewer penciled in beneath the “other” heading in the expenses section. I had wondered about an earlier written-in answer, in the migration section, but decided not to probe it. At this point in the process my job is mostly to skim the surveys in search of major errors. It turned out the two Burmese-language footnotes were related. The eldest son had left home to join the Burmese army, a rare enough choice in this fiercely proud ethnic (non-Burmese) region. More surprisingly, he had stopped sending home any of his paycheck. How come? He’d deserted. The family was now supporting him as he stayed on the run.

Every village was unique. Some collect crabs, some grow betel, some rely on relatives in Malaysia, some do all of the above. The people described lives that were just as interesting and complicated and troubled and joyful as any in urban jungles… minus such extravagances as electricity and motorized transport and phone connections. We learned about their complex systems of rice and livestock exchange. I believe the accounting abilities of some villagers would rival those on Wall Street or in the City of London.

Under Water

The monsoon always pounds Myanmar during July and August. But this year the heavens (and surely many earth-based causes) created hundred-year flooding.

I watched the rain fall from inside Rakhine State village homes. For the past two weeks, I followed survey takers from the government’s Department of Rural Development as they asked female heads of household an hour’s worth of questions about hunger and poverty.

The answers kept returning to the rising waters. A few households reported hunger, but rarely because of shortages. In this part of Myanmar, emergencies are more common than food gaps. Sometimes we were told that flooding had left people with no dry spot to cook the food they stored, so they went to bed hungry. Lately the water has risen as high as six feet, said our informants. This difficult situation is compounded by Rakhine State’s crazy politics, which often translate into horrifying injustice.

In one village near Taungup, farmers described having to essentially pay to work. Floods wiped out their first crop and their seed stocks. The local landlord (one government official owns the whole village) offered to advance them their wages in the form of rice. Because of interest payments, they’ll still owe at the end of the harvest.

Yesterday Myanmar’s president declared this state a natural disaster zone, along with Chin State and Magway and Sagaing Regions. Personally, I’m safely holed up in a hotel (the only guest at a place that can hold 300 people!) where I'm humbled by the adaptability of the local people. They continue to go about their routines despite the deluge. Many of them put on shoulder-width conical hats. They know they’ll get drenched, but at least the rice will get planted. Some families add layers of bamboo flooring to their homes as the water rises, and bring livestock in to join them.

While I wait for the storm to let up, I stay at the hotel, trying to track the movements of five survey teams that are still in the field. One team is stuck on an island where ferry service stopped a week ago due to the tropical storm. I hope they’re OK there. I haven’t been able to contact them directly because mobile phone connections to much of the state have been down for the past three days. My fingers are crossed that the team isn’t in danger, just maybe wet and discouraged. When we were last in touch, I told them that the survey is less important than their safety. Hope they listened—during training I could see they were quite serious about this project.

The hotel TV features flicks starring Stallone or Jackie Chan. If I switch the channel to CNN I get non-stop coverage of a plane fragment that’s supposed to solve a several-month-old mystery involving a flight that left Malaysia one night and was never heard from again.

Last night an Austrian couple showed up in the dining room. I asked them if anyone had mentioned that it rains in Rakhine State during July. They said no, they were shocked! They had booked a 12-day holiday! I laughed a little bit and suggested they could proudly tell all their neighbors back home that they were in Myanmar when a state of emergency was declared. They did not smile. Their expressions said, “No laughing matter.” This morning they were gone.

The “Up” in “Upbeat”

Among the best places to rise and shine is the back of a bicycle. It’s hard to beat early morning rides for putting the “up” in “upbeat.”

These days a few pals and I meet up once or twice a week before sunrise for a quick circuit to downtown Yangon and back. Our halfway point is a pier where local folks do group exercise to sounds from a boombox.

Their choice of tunes are the best part: jazzercised versions of Beethoven's “Ode to Joy” and the overture from Bizet’s Carmen. They follow up that routine with group laughter.

We’re back home by 7, at the office by 8:30, feeling positive. How could we not be?

Missed Connections

Surely you know the parallel meaning problem: when you talk or type past somebody without ever really discussing the same thing. Sometimes even close friends or couples experience conversations that edge by each other, either by design or by accident.

Let’s say two people are planning how to spend some free time together. Both might already have their own plan, making it hard at first to hear the other person’s idea, or to imagine that a different idea could even exist. With luck they know each other well enough to eventually get on the same track: “Oh, you wanted to go shopping first and then watch the video. OK, no problem. We can do it that way.”

Here in Asia the parallel meaning problem can have many added causes: culture clash, status difference, language gap, crackly phone connection. I prefer to think that most of the time such disconnects are innocent and unintentional, as in this recent text message exchange during a village survey project I was supervising:

Me (8:04 pm): Have a good day tomorrow in the village. Let me know how it goes.
He (8:07 pm): By car.

Now and then I can tell that somebody doesn’t want to answer a question directly, as in the case of a done deal:

Me (7:31 am): Don’t go by boat today. Bad weather coming. Too dangerous. Please let me know that you are safe now.
She (3:35 pm): We are finished with that village. We will go back to town now.

The problem gets trickier when fed by the risk of that most delicate of this continent’s threats: face loss. Sometimes people here deliberately derail two-way communication when they fear they will suffer a disgrace. I suspect that’s what was going on in this exchange:

Me (8:15am): Please let me know if u can get rate info. If not, just tell me u can’t. No pressure. Better than letting me guess. Please phone soon.
He (10:57 am): Sorry I’m late for information because of one funeral of my relative.
He (10:58 am): I will send that information right now.
He (10:59 am): Now I could not contact them, please wait.
Me (1:19 pm): What time can I call u?
Me (4:08 pm): Are you still there?
He (4:09 pm): Sure.
Me (4:10 pm): What news about rate information?
Me (4:35 pm): Can u help me?
He (4:37 pm): I’m waiting. For u.

My mistake. The more I persisted, the more desperate this guy’s attempts to fog the situation became.

In between the text messages, he also avoided answering his phone. When I tried to use a go-between, he dodged her too. In the end, cornered, he claimed he had been waiting for more information from me before he could proceed.

I should have known from the beginning that face loss was behind his foot-dragging. Early on, I should have tried another source or given up on getting that rate. Even though I was getting pressure from above, you would think I had been here long enough to see that one coming….

Such a Deal

The magicians at the photocopy shop here crank out new business cards in less than a day. Usually a box of 50 (4,000 kyat, or around three dollars) lasts me long enough to decide that I want to tinker with the wording. This time I decide nothing needs changing—just a refill.

I return the next day to pick them up. The owner hands me a box he says contains 108 cards. Is he playing around with me? I know that number often shows up in Buddhism and other spiritual contexts around the planet. There's also something astronomical—the distance from the Earth to the Sun, or energy lines, or whoknowswhat. But I was very clear about only needing 50. I ask him how much I owe.

"8,000 kyat."

He can see I’m a little annoyed about paying double what I expected.  

“Eight cards for free!” he smiles. What a great country.